Facebook wants to make it easier to jump between apps with App Links

Today at Facebook's F8 developer conference, the social networking giant unveiled a new initiative to make it easier to share data between mobile apps and the web: App Links. The open source service is meant to make it easy for developers to expose and integrate deep links into their app and into other apps with just a few lines of code.

App Links is designed to be cross platform, with support for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. App Links works not just between apps, but also from the web to mobile apps.

Currently developers have to code in each app to which they want to link. While there are a few standards meant to make that linking easier, there's nothing truly universal, let alone comprehensive in scope. App Links aims to solve that by making it possible to build in links to any appropriate apps on a mobile device without having to code in each one.

Part of the App Links system will be the Facebook Index API, which will serve as the central index of apps that support App Links.

In developing App Links, Facebook worked with a number of notable app developers that have already built-in the service, including Endomondo, Flixster, Hulu, Pinterest, and Spotify. Facebook has committed to building App Links into their own apps, but hasn't yet released an update with such support.

Integrating, centralizing, and simplifying the app-to-app sharing experience is a move that we welcome from Facebook. It's been nice to have a few apps working together here or there, but having a big company like Facebook pushing an initiative like this can't hurt.

Developers can go ahead and check it out everything the need to know about App Links at the source link below.